iLife!

Some stuff from the internets.

Check out this article: Its typical of its kind….

The Billion-Year Technology Gap: Could One Exist? (The Weekend Feature)

The part that annoys me:

Since at this point, there is no direct and/or widely apparent evidence that extraterrestrial life exists, it likely means one of the following:

We are (A) the first intelligent beings ever to become capable of making our presence known, and leaving our planet. At this point, there are no other life forms out there as advanced as us. Or perhaps extraterrestrial life does exists, but for some reason extraterrestrial life is so very rare and so very far away we’ll never make contact anyway—making extraterrestrial life nonexistent in a practical sense at least.

Or is it (B) that many advanced civilizations have existed before us, but without exception, they have for some unknown reason, existed and/or expanded in such a way that they are completely undetectable by our instruments.

Or is it (C) There have been others, but they have all run into some sort of “cosmic roadblock” that eventually destroys them, or at least prevents their expansion beyond a small area.

Really? That’s the best you can do towards an exhaustive list? Really? Come on!

And then, further down – more idiocy.

“Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Fermi Paradox is what it suggests for the future of our human civilization. Namely, that we have no future beyond earthly confinement and, quite possibly, extinction. Could advanced nanotechnology play a role in preventing that extinction? Or, more darkly, is it destined to be instrumental in carrying out humanity's unavoidable death sentence?” wonders Mike Treder, executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN).

Treder believes that some of the little understood new technologies now being developed such as nanotech, and others, could well be either our salvation or just as likely end up causing our ultimate destruction.

“Whatever civilizations have come before us have been unable to surpass the cosmic roadblock. They are either destroyed or limited in such a way that absolutely precludes their expansion into the visible universe. If that is indeed the case—and it would seem to be the most logical explanation for Fermi's Paradox—then there is some immutable law that we too must expect to encounter at some point. We are, effectively, sentenced to death or, at best, life in the prison of a near-space bubble,” suggests Treder. “Atomically-precise exponential manufacturing could enable such concentrations of unprecedented power as to result in either terminal warfare or permanent enslavement of the human race. Of course, that sounds terribly apocalyptic, but it is worth considering that the warnings we heard at the start of the nuclear arms race, and the very real risks we faced in the height of the Cold War, were but precursors to a much greater threat posed by an arms race involving nano-built weaponry and its accompanying tools of surveillance and control.”

You incompetent excuse for a science writer! Aaaaaargh!

Perhaps we just haven’t been contacted – we’ve been aware of our place in the universe in any meaningful way for less than 200 years and on the scale of the universe that’s nothing. NOTHING!

Maybe gigayear (or hell, megayear) civilizations don’t go beyond a single galaxy. Probability alone would solve our little ‘paradox’.

There are at least several other explanations I could think of to explain our little ‘paradox’. (And many have been highlighted in the comments after the post).

Bah!

And why this is important:

Evidence of life on Mars lurks beneath surface of meteorite, Nasa experts claim

Holy crap!!!! I mean, wtf WOW!!!!

WHY ON EARTH (hehe) ISN’T THIS ALL OVER TEH INTERNETS?!

If true, this is one of the single greatest moments in the history of mankind!!!

Why aren’t people making a bigger fuss?!

Elegance, a quest.

Have you ever noticed your math teacher exclaim about how elegant a solution was? Have you ever exclaimed in joy when you managed to cut through the sordid, confusing muck in a problem and found a solution that was simply brilliant!

If you’re an Engineer, or want to be one you know what I mean.

But what’s the big deal? Why is elegance so important? Perhaps we need to see what its really about:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry – Bertrand Russell

OR perhaps this rather vague one by the late great Paul Erdős -

 "Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is."

I don’t know about you. But to me they don’t really seem to know what they’re talking about do they? There, done, now bear with me for a moment, before you condemn me to the pits for such sacrilege.

Look at those two statements, look at the words they use and the feeling they seek to evoke. Its ill defined and nebulous at best. And that, I feel is because they’re tapping into one of those poles that define human thought. They aren’t able to explain what it is that they’re talking about because it isn’t possible to do so. Other things are defined in relation to our need for elegance. It, itself is a part of out minds as much as ‘wonder’ is.

We seek elegance in all things. And unlike so many of the other things that define what it is to be human, its a very concrete thing. Elegance can be seen and felt. It can be crafted and imagined and built. Of course, I refer to the elegance of simplicity. The elegance in which the form that is defined by function is in itself a beautiful thing. The faux notion of elegance – the one so often applied to fashion doesn’t appeal to me. It might to you, but to me it doesn’t carry anything like the primal weight that accompanies the elegance sought after by the sciences.

Elegance is simplicity. Elegance is where everything falls into perfect place with the least effort. Elegance is economy without any loss of efficacy. Elegance.

So much of mathematics is driven by our primal desire to seek elegance. So much of physics is driven by our desire (unfounded though, it may be) to define the universe in elegant terms. Indeed, the LHC was built, in a large part to satisfy our hunger for elegance – our current understanding of the universe (the standard model) is about as far from elegant as physicists could stand to be.

And it has an obvious origin. Elegance, as I said, is economy. And when economy and efficiency is the difference between being a meal and catching one – as it surely would have been to our ancestors hunting the Pleistocene savannah, it pays.

The quest for elegance among engineers is probably closer to that primeval need than the desire that drives mathematicians and physicists. In engineering, an elegant solution is often intuitive. And and intuitive solution is easy to verify. It matters in a physical sense too – a simple solution is often much cheaper than a complex one (but don’t let your intuition fool you – this is not often the case) and it is usually much easier to debug.

But its mostly some combination of economy of effort (read: laze) and economy of expense that drives us engineers towards elegance.

So where is this heading? Nowhere for now. I just wanted to set the stage for an argument I intend to post here soon (or at least as soon as is feasible).